SEATTLE – As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the country, people and communities have quickly learned to alter their behaviors and practices.

Dr. David Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, award-winning author and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. His wife Anne Biklé is a biologist, gardener and author who worked with her husband on their book, “The Hidden Half of Nature.”

Montgomery and Biklé, in their research and published works, have helped provide insights and understanding into the microbial science of soil, the implications it has on our own health, and potential practices that could help improve soil health on a global scale.

The two were recently approached by a scientific journal editor compiling a special volume involving various perspectives on the current pandemic.

“In our work on the last couple of books, we’ve looked at the sort of differences between practice and product,” Montgomery said. “We thought, with this current pandemic, we could recognize these parallels that we were writing about in our recent work.”

The article, “Lessons from a pandemic on practices versus products in agriculture,” identifies how the same swift changes we’ve seen in everyday life might be applied in an agricultural environment.

Biklé said that in most modern countries, there’s typically a product that can be bought to deal with whatever issue is present. With the pandemic, there really isn’t a product available to deal with that virus.

What evidence has shown, Biklé said, is that physical distance and other behavioral changes can be powerful in fighting the spread of the virus.

“A lot of us learned really quickly how to stay six feet apart from somebody else, or how to not touch things, or where’s my mask, now my behavior is I wear a mask wherever I go, and just how quickly those practices can be adopted,” Biklé said.

In their work, Montgomery said they’ve focused on the idea of practice versus product in terms of soil health and conventional farming practices versus regenerative ones, reducing the reliance on agricultural products.

“What was a real aha moment in this one was how clearly the lessons and the value of changes in our go-to practices can have big effects rapidly,” Montgomery said. “And we’re seeing that play out in the COVID pandemic. We’ve already kind of identified some of those issues in the agricultural world, so the spark was putting the two together.”

Montgomery’s book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” dives into some of the practices to implement more productive agricultural systems after talking with farmers from around the globe and observing their methods.

Montgomery said they were amazed to see how rapidly a lot of these practices could improve the soil.

“Rapidly, in that realm, you’re talking years or a decade or two,” Montgomery said. “So it’s not the overnight kind of changes that we’re seeing with practices in the pandemic.”

While the time scales differ, Montgomery said, the idea of practice versus product translates pretty well between the two systems.

“In ‘The Hidden Half of Nature,’ we were looking at comparisons between the world of soil and agriculture and the world of the human microbiome and human health, so taking it into the pandemic lesson was kind of a logical next step for us when they solicited us for the paper,” Montgomery said.

Biklé said that personally, she believes non-farmers are often unappreciative of how variable farming practices can be.

“The average person really doesn’t understand, or have much experience, with how much leeway and innovation a farmer can bring to how they farm,” Biklé said. “Of course, part of what would allow farmers to adopt new farming behaviors is whether or not they have some of the physical tools to enable some of these practices that we now know are very good for soil health.”

Biklé said there’s a wide range of new products out that can help boost these new practices in farming.

The pandemic has helped illustrate how quickly changes in behavior and practice can be implemented when a person, or group, is properly motivated, Montgomery said. The pandemic brought an issue that really hit everyone close to home, in their health and the health of their loved ones, he added.

One problem with issues like long-term soil degradation is that they’re sort of a “slow news” problem, Montgomery said.

“If you look at it over a longer time frame, it’s a critically important problem,” Montgomery said. “Perhaps seeing how quickly behavioral change can happen when we put our minds to it, it might help motivate us to think about some fairly large-scale behavioral changes, such as looking at conventional agricultural practices and thinking about shifting towards a more regenerative framework.”

Montgomery said they’ve found that implementing new regenerative farming practices and behaviors benefits farmers economically. The issue becomes finding a way to motivate that change on a large scale.

In the past 10 years, Montgomery said, he’s seen a huge increase in awareness of soil health in farmers and agriculture communities, and a motivation to actually change. Due to the longer time frame. he added, a lot of the results from these processes aren’t being seen or notice, just yet.

While he acknowledges it will take decades for these practices to take hold, Montgomery said he believes the economic benefits will motivate more and more farmers to change their strategies.

Montgomery said his background is in geology, initially trying to ignore the soil he’s now written multiple books about. As a geomorphologist, Montgomery said, he began studying erosion under natural properties, looking at soil degradation simply through the farming lens before looking at through the regenerative agriculture process.

It was at Biklé’s garden at their home in Seattle that their interest in soil health began to grow, as Biklé restored the fertility of the soil in their yard, laying the groundwork for “The Hidden Half of Nature.”

Biklé said her background in biology was more focused on plants, animals and the natural history aspects as opposed to more of a molecular-level research.

“I’ll admit, soil, at one time, did not interest me very much because I was far more interested in the parts of the nature that were big enough to see and watch and write about,” Biklé said.

“Soil is just way more of a living system than I think most people would give it credit for,” Biklé said. “It’s got all kind of life in it, and what scientists are learning is, it’s these relationships between the things and critters that live in soil that pretty much create the fertility in that soil.”

She said they just had to take the time to slow down and learn a little bit more about it.

Biklé said she can’t think of another time in her life that she’s been a part of a group or population that’s been able to change its behaviors “on a proverbial dime” after realizing that carrying out those practices might not be the best idea, as in case of the current pandemic.

It really shows the power these behavioral changes can have, and now it just becomes a matter of finding that motivation in agriculture.

“If we could get everybody involved in agriculture interested in the same sort of intense way around realizing that the health of our crops and, least of all our animals, pretty intimately ties to the health of our soil, I think that would be quite interesting because maybe we could get beahavior changes that affect the health of the soil,” Biklé said.

Montgomery and Biklé’s recently published articlecan be found at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-020-10102-z.pdf.